Don’t let your customer strategy get too swept up in World Cup fever

It’s safe to say that the World Cup creates a sense of excitement across the nation, with brands all over the world looking to cash in on the action, using it as a way of promoting particular products or offers. Similarly, it provides an opportunity for people to get behind their chosen team and enjoy one of the globe’s most eagerly anticipated events.

Whilst retailers see events such as these as great opportunities to make an early mark on the score sheet by encouraging more consumer spending, consumer spending habits remain largely the same during these periods, along with their perceptions of the speed of customer service, according to a recent survey we conducted.

We recently polled 2,000 adults in various age groups from across the UK, to understand how heavily the World Cup impacts the money they spend.

We found that 39% feel their spending remains more or less the same during an event such as the World Cup, with 36% saying they do not get caught up in the excitement surrounding the event. On the flip side, just 7% of respondents said they spend lots more during a period such as this.

It can be easy for companies to see the World Cup as a chance to go gung-ho with the tactics and use the excitement to drive increased customer activity, but these stats underline the need for customer experiences to remain consistent both during and outside of these periods.

Consumer spending habits aren’t as erratic as some may think and it’s therefore vital that businesses don’t lose sight of the fact that customer loyalty is built on being able to maintain a consistently high standard of product delivery and customer service.

Emphasising this, our survey also found that 45% believe that customer service remains unchanged in terms of quality and speed, or that they see no uplift in sales activity. This is in contrast to just 15% of those polled who say that customer service becomes faster, and 18% who feel that it slows down.

When it comes to customer engagement, perceptions can be just as important as the reality. From this evidence, it appears that any attempts to interact more readily with customers during events such as the World Cup do not have much of a lasting impact on customers. Instead, it’s important to approach engagement more like a tournament rather than a one-off game: positive relationships with customers should be built up over a longer period, meaning that businesses should never lose sight of their long-term customer engagement strategy.

To help meet these demands, businesses should make sure that they have the processes and technologies in place that enable customer engagement efforts to be quickly stepped up in case of spikes in activity, but also ensure that the quality of customer interactions is not compromised.

After all, these positive relationships are much more valuable to a company if they last well beyond England’s involvement in this year’s tournament!

To learn more about how you can ensure you have a consistent customer engagement platform, look at Aspect Via – everything you need in a single solution.